Life on the Run Read Online Free

other kids, but I could play basketball by myself. I didn’t need anybody else. All I needed was a ball and a basket, or at the beginning, when I was 10, only a ping-pong ball and a tin can.”
    By the time Dick was a sophomore in high school, basketball had become his consuming passion. He spent more time on the Roosevelt High School playground than anywhere else. A big concrete tennis court, long since abandoned, served as his gym. It had no lights but a basket stood at each end. That was all he needed. Dick played basketball every day during his sophomore, junior, and senior years, one thousand ninety-five straight days of basketball. Some days, he played from 9 A.M . until midnight, with an hour or two at home for meals of grits, lunchmeat, maple syrup, bread, and water. Other days, when the temperature shot up close to 100°, he played from six to ten in the morning and then came back at three and continued until midnight. One summer he got a job in the steel mills cleaning oil spills, coal bins, and lathes for seventy dollars a week. After working eight hours a day in the mills, he went to the playground for another four. When school was in session, he would get into the high school gym where he practiced from five until ten every evening. When the gym was closed and he couldn’t break in, he would shovel the snow off the playground and return to his familiar concrete. At first, he stole a ball from the school. Later, the high school coach gave him one. He says that he did not imitate anyone, but just started playing. His imagination provided the opponent and the game situation. He dribbled, faked, and took his jumper. He hooked and practiced twisting lay-ups. Occasionally, there would be a one-on-one game, but that wouldn’t last long. Dick was easily the best player in Gary. Still, he never relaxed his regimen. Even on the night of his senior prom, he was shooting. From the court, he watched his classmates in their tuxedos enter the prom. “I saw them, but they couldn’t see me because it was dark,” he says. “After a while, you’d adjust to the darkness and could play. You had a comfortable feeling about where you were…. Even when they couldn’t see me, they could hear the ball and they knew that it was me, Barnett, alone, shooting on Roosevelt playground.”
    In his senior year, Dick’s high school team lost in the Indiana State final to Indianapolis’ Crispus Attucks, whose best player was Oscar Robertson. College scouts recognized Dick’s ability and offered him scholarships. Dick chose Tennessee State, an all-black school in Nashville. High school had not prepared him for the academic side of college and when he got there he devoted little time to study.
    His college years—1955–1959—were turbulent ones for race relations in the South. Barnett experienced outright segregation for the first time in his life when he sat in the first row of a bus during his freshman year. Everybody stared at him and then he saw the sign, “Whites Only,” in the front of the bus. He experienced racial protest for the first time when he accompanied a group of students to a lunch counter sit-in. A white man spat in the face of one of his friends and the friend remained motionless. Such incidents had a lasting effect on Barnett’s view of whites and fused with his parents’ advice about self-reliance and the need to be better than a white man in order to succeed. Suspicion and distrust existed in him alongside great determination, pride, and good humor. Still, he was not a campus leader in the protest movement or the politics of race. He was first a basketball player; he didn’t have the time or interest for much else. Besides, being a star gave him a special status with most people at the school.
    After four years at Tennessee State, during which his team won three NAIA small college championships, Dick joined the Syracuse Nationals of the National Basketball Association. For two years, he suffered Syracuse